A previously unknown Masó villa in Sant Feliu de Guíxols comes to light

Friday, January 23, 2026

The Torre Trabal was a summer residence built between 1926 and 1927 in Sant Feliu de Guíxols

The latest volume of Estudis del Baix Empordà, the annual journal published by the Institut d’Estudis del Baix Empordà, brings to light a previously undocumented villa designed by the architect Rafael Masó in Sant Feliu de Guíxols. The discovery is presented in an article by historian Daniel Pedrero, entitled “The Torre Trabal in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, an unpublished work by the architect Rafael Masó”. The article includes Masó’s original plans for the villa, drawn up in 1926 and preserved in the Municipal Archive of Sant Feliu de Guíxols, along with photographs showing the severe damage the building suffered during the bombings of 1938.

Known as Torre Trabal, the villa was built as a summer residence between 1926 and 1927, commissioned by Francesca Trabal Fuster. Masó designed the project in October 1926, at a time when he was a frequent visitor to Sant Feliu de Guíxols, having begun work two years earlier on the first villas in the nearby development of S’Agaró. The building is restrained in style, but its most striking feature is the rounded structure on the east façade, whose openings retain Masó’s distinctive flared arches, topped by an inscription reading SALVE. Originally, the house had an additional storey, which was not rebuilt when the villa was reconstructed in 1944. This loss, combined with a complete redesign of the interiors, means that much of the original Noucentista character of Masó’s design has disappeared.

The Foundation has also recently identified another little-known intervention by Masó: the remodelling of interiors at Can Saüc in Vilablareix, the ancestral home of the Gispert-Saüch family. Masó had previously designed the Casa Gispert-Saüch in Girona for the same family in 1921, and around the same period he carried out a modest but refined intervention at the farmhouse. This included new ceramic wall panelling in the entrance hall and in the first-floor dining room. The ground-floor panelling features a simple geometric design using green and orange tiles, while the more elaborate dining-room panelling combines geometric patterns with floral motifs, elements that Masó frequently employed during this decade.